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Poster: stbalbach Date: Oct 31, 2008 8:46pm
Forum: texts Subject: Book digitized by Google and uploaded to the Internet Archive by user tpb

I've been seeing Google Book scans in the new uploads section. Here is one example:

http://www.archive.org/details/statistischemon01zentgoog

According to the first page (a Google notice) there are some restrictions on the scan:

1. It can't be used for commercial purposes. OK, Internet Archive is non-profit. It must be for personal use. No problem, matches IA's policy.

2. No searching ie. Internet Archive can't do full-text searching of the text via a search engine. Not a problem now since IA doesn't do full-text searching anyway, but could be an issue in the future I suppose.

3. Maintain attribution (watermarks). I don't see the "Digitized by Google" watermarks. Why? Become someone cropped them off. This is easy to see by looking at the original source scan on Google, and the uploaded version on IA - its been cropped to remove the Google watermark.

Well, maybe tpb is working under the radar and hoping no one notices or cares but it seems odd to remove the watermark, but keep attribution in the metadata and opening page, *shrug*. Now if tpb can figure out a way to remove all those "Digitized by Microsoft" watermarks, since Live Search Books is now defunct, that would be great :)

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Poster: donuil Date: Nov 1, 2008 11:21am
Forum: texts Subject: Re: Book digitized by Google and uploaded to the Internet Archive by user tpb

Yes, I was wondering about this too. Well, one can hardly fail to notice the size of the IA Texts Archive doubling rather quickly to over 1,000,000 items... and when one types in sponsor:"google", half of the Archive appears in the results.
I hope it is all... well... okay. But it seems to be at least semi-official, as there now is a collection homepage for Google Books: http://www.archive.org/details/googlebooks
I mean, Google would hardly miss someone pulling 500,000 of their public domain books. And they must have had vast processing power and storage space to convert them all to .djvu as well. Perhaps Google agreed to it?
I hadn't noticed that about the watermarks though.

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Poster: stbalbach Date: Nov 2, 2008 3:12pm
Forum: texts Subject: Re: Book digitized by Google and uploaded to the Internet Archive by user tpb

Hi thanks for the info, I had not noticed the Google sponsor category, which I guess makes it official. One thing I don't understand is why the books have such high download counts, as if they have been on Internet Archive for a long already. For example: http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=%28sponsor%3Agoogle%20AND%20mediatype%3Atexts%29 Books generally don't have such high download counts, in particular foreign language works, unless they've been around a while. Is it possible these books have been on IA for a while and attribution metadata was recently added? If so, how does it explain the sudden jump in total overall works to over 1 million - were the books not counted as part of the total before?
This post was modified by stbalbach on 2008-11-02 23:12:32

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Poster: stbalbach Date: Nov 2, 2008 3:26pm
Forum: texts Subject: Re: Book digitized by Google and uploaded to the Internet Archive by user tpb

Well, partly to answer my own question, looking at the full metadata record (under the "HTML files" link) it appears the "publicdate" field is recent, in the past few months, so they are recent additions. It's odd the download count is so high, this is representative of most them: http://www.archive.org/details/aabnegao00amorgoog Downloaded 45 times in the past few months. Strangely popular for an obscure Spanish language 19th century poet. Perhaps there is something going on internally either with the hit stats or mirroring by other libraries.
This post was modified by stbalbach on 2008-11-02 23:26:49

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Poster: donuil Date: Nov 3, 2008 12:19am
Forum: texts Subject: Re: Book digitized by Google and uploaded to the Internet Archive by user tpb

Oh, look, I came across another collection page, 'European Libraries'. http://www.archive.org/details/europeanlibraries
Seems to be all the Bodleian/Oxford University books from Google.

Re: the download numbers. I have never trusted the download numbers (that is, well before Google was added to IA); some seem completely absurd, and I had always just assumed it was the result of some sort of automation like crawling, mirroring, or whatever.

Thank you, by the way, for pointing out the metadata within the HTTP folder. I am in and out of those folders all the time and never noticed the full metadata was there!

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Poster: donuil Date: Nov 3, 2008 12:28am
Forum: texts Subject: Re: Book digitized by Google and uploaded to the Internet Archive by user tpb

Addition: The European Libraries also contain books from Lausanne and Ghent Universities, although Oxford makes up the vast majority.

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Poster: stbalbach Date: Nov 3, 2008 6:02am
Forum: texts Subject: Re: Book digitized by Google and uploaded to the Internet Archive by user tpb

Excellent, thanks. Hopefully they will list these libraries/collections on the main Text page with the others.

Re: download counts, yeah who knows, guess we'll need an insiders view to explain it.

Your welcome on the metadata, I just found it on a whim thinking it must be around somewhere since the main work page says "select" metadata, the rest had to be somewhere. I kinda wish they'd open it up to the community ala Wikipedia or LibraryThing, to correct errors and add info.

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Poster: garthus Date: Nov 1, 2008 4:32pm
Forum: texts Subject: Re: Book digitized by Google and uploaded to the Internet Archive by user tpb

Most of the latter Google books did not have watermarks on them. Actually all identification can be removed from these images with the right software.

As far as the full text search engine part. This would be illegal on Google's part since no one can copyright or restrict the text part of a public domain item. since the text part purely represents the content of the work it can never be placed in a restrictive context The image part can, but unfortunately an image of the same book can be scanned by several people and this would be hard to prove if the encryption and/or watermarks were removed. In any case their OCR is almost useless for a research database and I have been able to take their images and generate much better OCR from them that they have posted.

I have actually rescanned some of Google's books due to the poor quality of some of their scans, or sometimes rescanned part of their books. They would have a hard time enforcing any copyright rules in those cases.

As far as the Microsoft stuff, we can and should remove their watermarks, since once again this is after all public domain stuff. Some of the more egregious violators of Public Domain are the academic database providers. Eventually it would be nice and justified to tie them up in court for reverse copyright violations.

This is why I will be placing all of my academic materials up on Internet Archive as Public Domain 'copylefted' materials. Once the Internet Archive is large enough some of us can start taking legal action against these same database providers for placing our public domain materials in their restrictive databases.

The founding fathers of the United States would turn-over in their graves is the actually saw what the political scum in this country have done to the copyright laws. Protection was never meant to be for all eternity or for some parasitic mega-corporate mass-media corporations.

Gerry

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Poster: Jim Carlile Date: Nov 1, 2008 11:44pm
Forum: texts Subject: Re: Book digitized by Google and uploaded to the Internet Archive by user tpb

Yeah, apparently the term "limited" in the Constitution now means 'finite'. Limited means limited though, but because property rights are what this is all about, it's not gonna change.

Actually-- from what I can find-- Google has no legal responsibility to provide downloads of the PD scans-- all they have to do is make them viewable under the library agreements-- just display. So, downloading is discretionary on their part right now, and who thinks it's gonna last? especially when they find that most of their 1922-1964 OOP books are also PD as well!

The new Settlement also requires them to very quickly identify all their PD scans-- all of them-- but they haven't so far.

BTW, Did Google strip all the color informations off their PD scans, or is that just my imagination? They seem smaller and all B/W.

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Poster: garthus Date: Nov 2, 2008 4:56am
Forum: texts Subject: Re: Book digitized by Google and uploaded to the Internet Archive by user tpb

This is exactly the situation with the Sam's Photofact series. They are charging for viewers to see their material almost all of which is Public Domain. This is why it is critical that this stuff get put up on Internet Archive as soon as possible. They admitted to me, (their legal department) that they screwed up by not renewing the copyrights and that they could not stop anyone from posting these materials. Since then I have purchased several thousand of their Photofact documents and have started scanning them for the Archive. Eventually when they realize that the materials are all up on the internet anyway, they will be wasting money with their scheme. Ebay is a good place to buy much of this stuff very inexpensively, the same applies to Google, it will be difficult for them to make any money from their scheming with the large publishers when much of their stuff will be posted in the Internet Archive.

Copylefted stuff created today is also very important, since in academia, much of what is written has some degree of plagiarism, once these materials are copylefted, the copyrighted materials being held by the publishing house will have been contaminated by the copylefeted stuff and they will be hoisted upon their own petard. It is only a matter of time before the so-called intellectual property rights arena will be obfuscated with these convoluted and unfair copyright statutes. The technologies are advancing much faster than the political scum and corporate greedsters realize.
Gerry

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Poster: chockroberty Date: Dec 18, 2014 11:21am
Forum: texts Subject: Re: Book digitized by Google and uploaded to the Internet Archive by user tpb

I saw that the Sams Photofacts are there for CB radios. I have a couple of old transistor radios I want to repair and am trying to find quality information. Do you have any of the transistor manuals that you are going to upload? I can't justify paying $22 for a schematic to fix a radio I paid $2 for. But I'd love to get these old radios going just to keep them out of the landfill.

I have some manuals I bought or came with some of my old radios that I plan to scan and make available to people for free. I already uploaded my scan for the Swan 270 ham radio transceiver and another radio.

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Poster: Jim Carlile Date: Nov 2, 2008 2:43pm
Forum: texts Subject: Re: Book digitized by Google and uploaded to the Internet Archive by user tpb

Cool thing to do. Taking it into your own hands.

BTW, It's really obvious that google will soon be getting out of the free PD download business. That would explain why they are not complaining about tons of scans being placed into the Archive-- they'd love to have someone else take on this task. So there will still be a big role of the IA.

Google's rationale to themselves may even be that they don't want to compete with them when it comes to PD works!

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Poster: tammytroot Date: Nov 2, 2008 6:00pm
Forum: texts Subject: Re: Book digitized by Google and uploaded to the Internet Archive by user tpb

I don't know anything about the technical or the copyright aspects of the Google material posted here, but I can say that 90% of the scans I've come across are very poor quality compared with the Microsoft scans.

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Poster: m.r.b. Date: Nov 9, 2008 12:43am
Forum: texts Subject: Re: Book digitized by Google and uploaded to the Internet Archive by user tpb

"I don't know anything about the technical or the copyright aspects of the Google material posted here, but I can say that 90% of the scans I've come across are very poor quality compared with the Microsoft scans."

I downloaded all three of the Google copies of Poetics. Only one of them was without errors and even there the quality was marginal. It seems like the only reason to choose a Google scan over another version for a smaller file size. The quality is awful. I cannot imagine how they think people are going to pay them for copies of out-of-print works if these scans are representative of the quality.

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Poster: beautysmom Date: Nov 16, 2008 11:16pm
Forum: texts Subject: Re: Book digitized by Google and uploaded to the Internet Archive by user tpb

I too have been trying to use some of the texts posted from Google Books by tpb, and am totally appalled by the lack of any kind of quality in the submissions. Missing pages, inverted or blurred scans, and so forth. This is not preserving books for the future, this is just utterly irresponsible "make work" that has little or no value. How very disappointing, given the quality that TIA has always been noted for in the past!

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Poster: DE2164 Date: Nov 24, 2008 11:05am
Forum: texts Subject: Re: Book digitized by Google and uploaded to the Internet Archive by user tpb

I agree that that most all Google material is garbage.

Fortunately the descriptions have the fact they are Google scans and you can avoid them. Though if you have the thumbnails turned on you can see that the book is of very low quality too.

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Poster: Time Traveller Date: Nov 24, 2008 9:35pm
Forum: texts Subject: Re: Book digitized by Google and uploaded to the Internet Archive by user tpb

I think Google has been getting into trouble with copyright, could it be that they are degrading the quality of their scans on purpose, as a means of heading off legal action by pay-for-text publishers?

Anyway, thanks to you and others for the headzup on Google scans.

Peter in NZ

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Poster: stbalbach Date: Nov 25, 2008 6:26am
Forum: texts Subject: Re: Book digitized by Google and uploaded to the Internet Archive by user tpb

Google knows it has quality control problems and more recently it has improved - but there are still a lot of older poor quality scans floating around. I could see Google releasing those older scans to Internet Archive with the idea that in the future they will be replaced with better quality ones. It might help explain why the Google watermark was removed. But just speculation.

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Poster: DE2164 Date: Nov 25, 2008 9:46pm
Forum: texts Subject: Re: Book digitized by Google and uploaded to the Internet Archive by user tpb

Sadly, they remain to pollute the IA servers and waste space. Not to mention the pain of having to use the advance seach feature just to avoid having to dig through them.

Yes, the files that Google have made in the last 8 months are much better. Still 50% batter quality is well below the quality expected from IA.

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Poster: lotusgreen~ Date: Jan 14, 2009 9:20am
Forum: texts Subject: Re: Book digitized by Google and uploaded to the Internet Archive by user tpb

i get so upset with tpb because whomever that is keeps uploading picture books without the pictures. at least they act as an index of sorts to google books because the google ones do have the images included.

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Poster: stbalbach Date: Jan 14, 2009 3:08pm
Forum: texts Subject: Re: Book digitized by Google and uploaded to the Internet Archive by user tpb

Interesting. Can you post a URL for example? I'd like to see it (or not in this case).

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Poster: lotusgreen~ Date: Jan 14, 2009 8:27pm
Forum: texts Subject: Re: Book digitized by Google and uploaded to the Internet Archive by user tpb

yes. okay -- here's a book on google:

http://books.google.com/books?id=4WEMAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=%22a+friend+or+two%22&ei=yrpuSYTkMo3WlQTTsJGCCw&client=firefox-a#PPP6,M1

and here is tpb's version:

http://www.archive.org/stream/afriendortwo01nesbgoog

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Poster: stbalbach Date: Jan 14, 2009 9:13pm
Forum: texts Subject: Re: Book digitized by Google and uploaded to the Internet Archive by user tpb

The book main page: "A Friend or Two" http://www.archive.org/details/afriendortwo01nesbgoog Click on "HTTP", then click on the .pdf file, and it will bring up the color version. I see what you mean about the Flip Book and DjuVu versions are in B&W, looks like a conversion problem, or policy decision.. I don't know if it's related, but there is also a B&W version both on Google and Internet Archive: http://www.archive.org/details/afriendortwo00nesbgoog http://books.google.com/books?id=askCAAAAYAAJ&oe=UTF-8 Interesting book btw.
This post was modified by stbalbach on 2009-01-15 05:13:18

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Poster: lotusgreen~ Date: Jan 14, 2009 9:19pm
Forum: texts Subject: Re: Book digitized by Google and uploaded to the Internet Archive by user tpb

well whaddaya know! i forgive tpb everything!

but one question, if i may: is there a way to see the color version here before downloading the pdf?

i followed your instructions, but it downloaded the pdf; is there a way to see it?

and i wonder if there's a way to suggest to somebody that it would be great if these had color flipbooks....

thank you!

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Poster: stbalbach Date: Jan 14, 2009 9:26pm
Forum: texts Subject: Re: Book digitized by Google and uploaded to the Internet Archive by user tpb

The idea of Flip Book is exactly that, so you don't have to download the PDF. So yeah. It looks like a bug or error that should be reported. Good catch.

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Poster: lotusgreen~ Date: Jan 14, 2009 9:48pm
Forum: texts Subject: Re: Book digitized by Google and uploaded to the Internet Archive by user tpb

thanks! :^)

should i report it? (to whom???) or are you going to? (forgive me but i don't know if you work here or what....)

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Poster: lotusgreen~ Date: Jan 14, 2009 10:01pm
Forum: texts Subject: Re: Book digitized by Google and uploaded to the Internet Archive by user tpb

oh--you know what i just realized?: if you do not click on http but click directly on pdf you're immediately taken to the google page for the book with color examples of any illustrations. you download from there.

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Poster: stbalbach Date: Jan 15, 2009 5:46am
Forum: texts Subject: Re: Book digitized by Google and uploaded to the Internet Archive by user tpb

Yeah.. but the Flip Book should still be in color. This forum is the place to report. Since this thread is old and down the list I may re-post a summary as a new post.

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Poster: lotusgreen~ Date: Jan 15, 2009 8:30am
Forum: texts Subject: Re: Book digitized by Google and uploaded to the Internet Archive by user tpb

thanks!